This Father’s Day takes place amid growing assault on what is widely called “patriarchy.” In the era of #MeToo-inspired militant feminism, it’s become increasingly fashionable to reject maleness and castigate fatherhood, as largely irrelevant and even damaging.

To be sure, patriarchy has its faults, as #MeToo and feminists well before them have rightly pointed out. But today’s wrath is not confined to chronic abusers like Harvey Weinstein, but the entire gender.

Sociologist Suzanna Danuta Walters, writing in the Washington Post, suggests, for example, that men being responsible for much of the ills of the world as reason enough to “hate men.” “Maybe it’s time for us,” she says, “to go all Thelma and Louise and Foxy Brown on their collective butts.”

Why dads matter

The radical feminist assault on men is certainly no gift to our children. To be sure, single moms can achieve great things, and grandparents, as was the case for President Obama, can raise an outstanding human being. But both girls and boys clearly benefit from the presence of two parents, which usually means a mom and dad. Of course, we should also favor the adoption of children into gay couples or by a single parent as vastly preferable to an abusive home or none at all.

But overall children raised in intact families generally do much better than those raised by one parent. This is particularly true for poor children, and racial minorities, where the lack of two parents, usually dads, is directly tied to declining economic mobility; over two-thirds of black children are raised single-parent, and are usually fatherless. No amount of fashionable sociological gibberish can replace the simple truth that kids raised with both parents do better in school, in society and life.

Bonds that matter

Rather than seek to start a war between the sexes, we should place more emphasis on how they each can play important and complementary roles. For very young children, there is really no effective substitute for the emotional warmth emanating from a committed mom, as psychoanalyst Erika Komisar has demonstrated.

The role of men is different but not inferior. Active paternal involvement can contribute greatly to a child’s cognitive development, notes a recent British study. Fathers, in most case, are also far more likely still to serve as the primary family breadwinners with full-time jobs, particularly when children are small. For their part, two-thirds of mothers, notes Pew, would prefer to work part-time or not at all.

Such findings, of course, constitute heresy against the feminist ideology, which often sees full-time careers as the only way to be a fully realized human being. The late feminist icon Betty Friedan once compared housewives to people marching voluntarily into “a concentration camp.” One recent New York Times article even linked women who choose to stay at home with “white supremacy,” something odd to someone who’s the grandson of a socialist feminist arrested for supporting birth control but who later stayed at home to raise three children.

The gap between feminist ideologues and reality often seems unbreachable. At a recent panel at the University of Southern California, I sat with three female academics. I seemed the only one with children. But, when a student cited the notion that dads with girls tend to be more protective and conservative, I half-jokingly agreed, having two daughters myself. This expression of concern for the vulnerability of young females in this society led one of the professors to accuse me of being a “misogynist.”

No apologies, Happy Father’s Day!

I do not apologize for my protectiveness of my girls, nor would I think they would be better off if I just faded away. Our priority should not be to seek expanding single parenthood, but how to best reverse it. The percentage of children without married parents has grown over the last 50 years from 7 to over 40 percent. Many of feminism’s leading lights today would applaud this development as they hope to destroy both marriage and the family.

Rather than seek to destroy traces of traditional family, perhaps we should instead encourage a reformed patriarchy that embraces greater equality. This, fortunately, could already be developing. Pew notes that today’s dads spend three times as much time with their kids than in 1965 and share much more time on household chores, even though the percentage of single-earning dads has actually risen slightly since 2010.

Family, including fatherhood, may be changing but remains essential to human progress. As Margaret Mead once said, “no matter how many communes anyone invents, the family always creeps back.”

The message for my fellow dads: Don’t be intimidated by the feminist male haters, but also just don’t be a jerk. Patriarchy may have its downside, but without a strong male role in the family, the future will be far worse, most particularly for our children.

Joel Kotkin is the R.C. Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University in Orange and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism (www.opportunityurbanism.org).